


Requiem at Reichenbach

by Alixtii



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Doyle
Genre: 19th Century, Adoption, Astronomy, Authority Figure, Backstory, Betrayal, Butterfly Effect, Calculus, Canon Related, Case Fic, Causal Determinism, Chaos Theory, Criminal Masterminds, Crossdressing, Crossgen, Deduction, Dinner Party, Disguise, Dysfunctional Family, Education, Enemies, Erudition, Family, Ficathon, Flashback, Friends to Enemies, Gen, Guardian-Ward Relationship, Historical, Litfic, Logic, Male Antagonist, Male Homosociality, Male Protagonist, Mathematics, Memories, Misogyny, Murder, Mystery, No Sex, Organized Crime, POV First Person, POV Male Character, Partnership, Past Tense, Pre-Canon, Reichenbach, Reichenbach Falls, Rivalry, Switzerland, Teacher-Student, Teamwork, The Final Problem, The Valley of Fear, Uncle-Niece Relationship, Undressing, United Kingdom, Unreliable Narrator, Victorian Age, Yuletide, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-25
Updated: 2006-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-03 09:48:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alixtii/pseuds/Alixtii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is as if the whole universe were set in motion to bring us to this moment, Holmes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Requiem at Reichenbach

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/gifts).



Surely, Holmes, you recognize the singular importance of Porlock. Without him, our game of cat and mouse would have been impossible. His was the variable that balanced the equation of our matched wits.

Which is not to say that there was any unique significance to Porlock himself, of course. He was a common enough man, of whose mold London is filled with thousands of plaster copies: a thief, a fool, a follower. But that someone should play his rôle, that some actor should when the curtain rose speak his lines and make his gestures, was absolutely imperative to the design of both our lives.

Where would we be now, Holmes, were it not for Porlock? None of us can say for sure. I have taught you how even an infinitesimal change can, over repeated iterations, produce results that render the output virtually unrecognizable from the input. A single fleck of dust can so alter the path of an asteroid so as to crash it into a planet or to drive it into the star around which it orbited. Or, if such a fate had hitherto been destined it, then the same fleck of dust could be that which grants it reprieve. So would it be in a world without Porlock. Perhaps I would be the undisputed ruler of London, of England, of the British Empire, of the world. Perhaps you would be ruling by my side, or already dead from an assassin's air gun. Perhaps I would be rotting in a London prison, or husband to a lady of the house of Saxe-Coburg, or the Dean of Christ Church. Perhaps you would be laid to rest in Covent Green as a result of self-poisoning yourself with cocaine, driven to the drug by boredom, or perhaps you would have channeled your ability to other ends and have been London's best barrister, or boxer, or violinist, or scientist. Perhaps--when one is speaking of what-ifs and if-onlys, then that is all one can ever say: perhaps.

And yet even the fleck of dust is driven by the same inexorable laws as the asteroid, set in motion at the universe's creation. A world without a Porlock is as unthinkable as a world without you or I. We are all apiece variables in the same equation. There could have been no fates for us, Holmes, that did not lead us inextricably to this moment. It is as if all the universe, asteroids and flecks of dust alike, were set in motion as to conspire to bring us to this moment, locked in each other's arms as we fall to our deaths, the roar of the falls of Reichenbach behind us.

You must admit, Holmes, there is a beauty in its symmetry. Even if the laws of reason did not demand it, still would the laws of poetry.

  
* * *

  
You were not beautiful in the way that boys are sometimes beautiful, Holmes. Even as an adolescent you were already tall and lanky, and your nose--which your friend and chronicler Dr. Watson would call "hawk-like"--had already taken on its later figure. Still there was a sort of regal handsomeness to your features even then.

You had the figure of an athlete, and it was clear you were one of those lucky few who can cease participation of a sport and then, on a whim, pick it up again no worse for the lack of practice. You had traveled in a train that morning. Your parents were neither poor nor rich; you loved your mother but were aloof towards your father; you were not a virgin. You had already begun to smoke tobacco and use cocaine, but at that point both were infrequent and always in moderation. You were incredibly intelligent, but lacked direction. You were left-handed, put on your right shoe before the left, and had no more than three quid fifty in your waistcoat pocket.

All of this I saw in a glance; you know the methods--indeed, history will no doubt remember them as your own. Still, there were a thousand questions left unanswered.

  
* * *

  
Surely you must admit that you were a miserable excuse for a student, Holmes. You gave your schoolwork no more than the most cursory attention, and while you had a quick and analytical mind that was ideally predisposed to mathematical reasoning, your mastery of even the lowest of the higher maths was abysmal. Your only interests were boxing, sword-fighting, and violin-playing, and in none of these areas was your interest quite enough to drive you to hone your skill to professional quality.

You absolutely refused to learn the calculus. "Can I carry an infinite number of pounds on me?" you asked of me. "Can I walk an infinite number of yards or live for an infinite number of years? The infinite appears nowhere in nature, and as thus the practical mind, dealing in what is real and thus finite, has no need of it. You tell me that if I cut a circle into an infinite number of pieces I can rearrange them so as to form a rectangle. I see the evident usefulness of such a piece of information in that it shall allow me to measure a circle should I need to do so, but why on earth should I need to know how or why this should be so?"

I shared my frustration with my colleague, Rutherford, a much-respected and learned man of science. "Aye, that's a Holmes for you," he responded. "They're a lazy sort. I taught his brother Mycroft, and it was the same story. Smartest lad I've ever known, but he lacked the ambition to put it to any use. I hear he has some petty clerkship in government now; he's not fit to be anything but a bureaucrat. I wouldn't be surprised if this Sherlock were the same story. A waste, I tell you, a real waste."

I was not going to let your singular mind go to waste. I argued and I fought, I prodded, I tried to demonstrate to you the beauty of mathematics, of a perfect world perfectly ordered, controlled by pure reason, mechanical and predictable.

Every word fell on deaf ears.

  
* * *

  
The way you came running in to the room alerted me instantly that something was amiss; the blood on your shirtsleeve confirmed the hypothesis. "Professor Mortiarty," you cried out, "it is Doctor Rutherford!"

Already I was up out of my chair. Blood does not spring to shirtsleeves ex nihilo, and you had no sign of cuts or scrapes. "What is it, boy?" I asked, following him as he raced.

"I believe he is murdered, Professor."

You were not the sort of boy to believe things idly, without evidence. If you believed that Rutherford had been murdered, then I would have have wagered my last shilling that Rutherford had had exactly that done to him. And of course, he had. I found him with a soft-nosed revolver bullet mushroomed in his neck. An air gun.

Rutherford was not simply my colleague in the world of numbers and theorems, of academicians delivering papers to rooms of learned men. He was my accomplice as well in the underground world of organized crime, and this blow against him was equally a blow against me--a blow against order, against power, against the purity of a single criminal vision. And the use of an air gun implied that the assassin came from within that organization--a chaotic seed that would destroy it from within if it were not weeded out.

There was only one thing to be done. The culprit must be found, and made an example of. To do anything else would be to look weak. My entire leadership had suddenly fallen into jeopardy with Rutherford's death.

"The window, Holmes!" I called to you, not taking my eyes off the wound. "Is it shattered?"

"Twice," you answered.

My eyes were torn instantly away from Rutherford's corpse. The window was indeed shattered twice, and now that I thought to look up I could see another bullet lodged into the ceiling. Any thoughts that the bullets had belonged to my second in command, Moran, were banished instantly from my mind. That he might miss the first shot was unthinkable, and he lacked the imagination to fire a second shot simply to confuse the trail.

Having learned all I could from the room, I made my way outside. Sure enough, nearby there was a tree from which one would have a clear aim to the window--and a set of footprints had walked up to and away from it.

Distances and angles raced through my mind. "Whoever did this was quite short, say about five feet two. There are not many men of that stature--he should prove quite easy to find."

You looked amazed by my deduction. "How on earth could you possible know that, Professor?"

"The angles, Holmes. Have I taught you nothing?"

You looked thoughtful. You glanced at the footsteps on the walk, then at the window, and I could see you recalling lessons half-listened to, freshly calculating the angles in your own mind. "Could it have been a woman?" you asked at last.

Instantly I seized on your question as the truth. "Of course, Holmes! Now that you say it it is obvious. It was a woman who fired the shot. But what type of coward sends a woman do his murdering for him? And what sort of woman is capable of working an air gun?"

You, of course, did not know the answer to these questions, and so remained silent.

A thought occurred to me. "Could you be a woman, Holmes?"

You blinked. "I beg your pardon, Professor."

"Can you disguise yourself so that someone who does not know would believe you were a woman?"

You thought furiously, your brow furrowing as you considered the possibilities. Oh, what a delight to see your first-rate mind at last turned to a problem with all of its might. "Given the proper materials, I believe so."

"Then to my house at once," I said. "Tonight the dean is hosting a party, and I would not be surprised in the least if our culprit is among his guests. My niece has clothing which, while certainly not your size, can perhaps be made to fit you. Come on, Holmes--the game is afoot!"

Thus began the first case of Sherlock Holmes.

  
* * *

  
As I have said, you were not a beautiful boy, and as such I would not have expected you to make a beautiful woman. The best I could have hoped for, I would have thought, would have been a woman who was plain rather than ugly. And so you can imagine my surprise when my niece Isabella appeared alongside a specimen of womanhood so perfect that I could hardly believe my eyes. "May I present Miss Cheryl Harkness to you, Uncle," Isabella introduced you.

Isabella's mother had been an actress, and although Isabella had not inherited her late mother's beauty in full, neither was she homely. (Neither, it must be granted her, had she inherited my late brother's foolishness in full; indeed, if there was anyone in our family after whom she took, it was myself.) And yet, she was overshadowed as surely as are the stars in the sky by their closer cousin our sun.

That the girl alongside my niece should be you seemed impossible. Only the shape of your ear gave testimony that Sherlock Holmes and Cheryl Harkness were, indeed, the same person. You were at least a head taller than most of the boys your age, and yet Miss Cheryl Harkness, though she seemed to stand at her full stature, towered no more than half a head above her companion Isabella Moriarty.

My first thought was to be vexed. "Come on, Holmes," I said, "this will never do. How do you expect to keep yourself hidden if you are turning every head which sees you?"

"Can you find any flaw in my disguise?" Holmes asked, his voice an octave higher. I had to admit that I could not. "Then it will not suffer for being much-looked at. Who would suspect a deception hidden in plain sight?"

The argument was flawless, and I was filled with the pride that only a teacher can feel. "Quite so, Holmes."

  
* * *

  
My night was, as all my nights at such functions have always been, completely dreadful. And yet as I sat half-listening to one interminable anecdote followed by another, the portion of my attention which would usually have been focused upon the degree of my hatred was instead filled with the keenest of anticipations as I thought of you and Isabella in the other room with the other women. At long last the affair was ended, and upon our return to my manor you and I shut ourselves in the study as Isabella retired to bed.

Instantly you began shedding garments, and I watched Cheryl Harkness transform into Sherlock Holmes before my eyes. "You will forgive me for my undress, Professor, but I am grateful for the chance to at last stretch myself. However convincing my costume may have been, I am not a girl of height five foot six, and it was not without some discomfort that I managed to impersonate one."

I told you that of course I was grateful for your sacrifice and to please make yourself comfortable. "What have you learned, Holmes?"

"Only that woman is the vilest and lowest species of all of humankind!" Holmes erupted. "All ability they might possess seems to be devoted against themselves, to bringing the others of their sex low. The evening was filled with nothing but gossip and rumor-mongering."

"Come now, Holmes, what have you learned relating to the matter at hand?"

You deflated. "Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Absolutely nothing. They blathered on all night, providing me with no useful information of any sort."

You were young, Holmes, and it seemed you would still need some guidance. Luckily, you had your teacher at hand. "Surely it is not as bad as that. Do you remember the dean's fireplace?"

You looked uncertain, not sure where I was going with the sudden change in the line of inquiry, but gave a quick nod nonetheless.

"Do you remember the inscription upon the mantle above it?"

"Some line of Roman verse, I believe," you offered, your mind searching your memory. "`Sed nuda potestas armauit fratres, pugna est de paupere regno,' I believe."

"It is no more Roman than you or I," I corrected you. "Like us, it is British--Lydgate, to be exact. I leave the translation to you as an exercise, as it has no bearing on this strange affair that I can see."

"Then why--" you had already begun to question.

"To demonstrate the process of observation required," I answered without letting you complete your question. "It shall be upon a seemingly meaningless detail such as that that our investigation will hinge, we can be sure. You have observed as if by instinct, but you do not know you have observed. You need a skilled interrogator to draw it out of you. Very well, I shall play your inquisitor."

Oh, the battle of wits that began that night! My mind and yours, working against each other even as we worked to a common end, as I drew the details of the evening from you one by one. Soon we had assembled a large enough collection from which to draw deductions, and each piece of reasoning led to a new conclusion. You deduced the existence of a large underground organization, devoted to crime, of which Rutherford had been a member and to which our murderess was in some way associated. We moved slowly, following the trail of deductive reasoning to its end for an hour and a half, until at the very end it was your mind which made the leap to the final conclusion.

"It is impossible," were my first words when you explained to me your conclusions.

You shook your head, confident--how different than the timid boy I knew! "It is only improbable," you corrected. "The impossible is what we have eliminated, and thus that which remains--"

"Must be the truth," I finished for you, instantly seizing on your thought. "Quite so. If there is anything in which we can place our trust, it is in such an indubitable law of logic as that. Very well, then. I have been blinded by my own prejudice." I nodded, instantly frustrated at the very futility of the gesture. Telemachus listened to his mother speak, and sneezed; James Moriarty heard Sherlock Holmes deduce the murderer of Samuel Rutherford, and nodded. I wished to take the very sphere of the Earth and fling it from its axis, but I was reduced to all inaction save to nod. "There remains, then, the question of how we should proceed."

"Perhaps it would be best if we were to invite the young lady to speak for herself?" you suggested.

Agreeing, I rang for the maid and, on her appearance, informed her that she should tell Miss Isabella to come immediately. She was off with a curtsey, and returned within a minute, unaccompanied, with the message that Miss Moriarty had already turned in for the night and, as such, was in no state to receive visitors. Nor, the message continued, would she hold any interest in seeing Mr. Sherlock Holmes again even if her state of dress permitted it.

"I do not care if she is as naked as Lady Godiva," I said, my anger suddenly quickened. The reality of her betrayal fell upon me as the weight of the world upon the titan's shoulders. "I have given my orders for her to stand before myself and Mr. Holmes, and if she will not come downstairs to do so, then we will come upstairs to her. The sanctity of a young girl's bedroom will not protect her tonight. Come, Holmes. We will see this to the end."

That said, I rose and led the way to my young ward's bedchambers. I struck my walking stick alongside her door, then went to open it. Finding her door locked, I sent the maid to fetch the key. When the door was at last opened, we found Isabella, dressed in her nightgown, standing in the center of the room.

"I will not ask you to explain your intrusion, Uncle," she said simply. "It is obvious that Holmes has brought your attention to matters to which I had rather expected you to remain blind. I had not anticipated that you should have a student so gifted. My commendation to you, Holmes."

"You have murdered a man, Isabella!" I burst out. "What kind of creature are you?"

The expression upon her face changed not in the least. "Your niece, Uncle James--no more and no less."

"There is only one thing I do not understand," you broke in. "I have deduced the who and the how, but the whyfore is still beyond me. What drew you into this den of thieves in which you have extricated yourself so thoroughly that you could commit such an atrocity as you have done?"

She began to be laugh, uncontrollably. It was as if a madness had taken over her and delivered her into the hands of hysteria. "You have seen so much, Mr. Holmes, and still you are blind to the most basic fact of them all! I was not drawn into the world of organized crime, I was born into it--or rather I was initiated into it on that fateful day when my parents were stolen from me and my guardianship was transferred into the hands of my Uncle James. It is he, and no other, who is the leader of the infernal organization in which I have involved myself. My uncle is a Caesar, an Alexander, a Napoleon of crime."

She paused, taking a moment to draw herself up. Suddenly, she was no longer an unassuming schoolgirl, but an imposing figure worthy of the crime she had committed/ "But each of those great leaders had their empires passed into other hands. And so is it time for your empire to do the same, uncle." From within the bodice of her nightgown she pulled a small revolver. With the calm, cool confidence of someone who knows his weapon, she raised it until it was aimed squarely at my heart.

"Would you rather have been the ward of an army colonel or a stationmaster?" I asked with disdain. "There was no one else to take you in. You owe everything to me."

Her mouth twitched. "Oh, do not doubt that I will repay with interest what you have done to me. I may miss when armed with an air gun aiming through a window, but I do not fear that I shall miss my target tonight."

"Miss Moriarty, I beg you," you interjected. "One murder may be a woman's folly, but to kill your uncle would be to hang for sure. Throw yourself at the mercy of the courts."

"The courts, the prisons, the police--do you think any of these are outside my uncle's influence?" Isabella asked you. "I shall know no mercy as long as he is alive. When he is dead, I will take his place and it shall be I who will rule London. My mind is no less able than his; already the preparations are in place for my usurpation of his rule."

It was then that you threw yourself upon her. It was a foolish, reckless act and of course she fired her revolver immediately. And yet you had startled her enough to upset her aim, and the bullet thankfully lodged itself into my shoulder rather than my heart. Quickly, I raised my walking stick and, as the two of you grappled on the floor, brought it down against her head, stunning her. The next strike was the killing blow.

You extricated himself from her lifeless form, looked up at me with unbelieving eyes. "You needed not to have delivered the killing blow," you observed. "You have murdered her, as surely as she had murdered Doctor Rutherford, and no more justly."

I wiped the blood from my walking stick. "Surely if we were to put the matter before the courts, they would rule that I had acted in self-defense even if you were to give testimony to the contrary. It was dark, you were caught in the throes of emotion, your attention was distracted by your own struggle with the lady, and you observed imperfectly. But we will not put the matter before the courts. Know that I could easily have you hang for the murder you claim you saw me commit.

"But you saw nothing. You were not here in my house this evening; you did not hear Isabella Moriarty identify me as the leader of organized crime in London; the Miss Cheryl Harkness who accompanied my niece to the dean's party was not you in disguise. Be sure that if you were to utter such a claim you shall find yourself before a court to answer for your slander. Now get out of my house, Holmes."

You rose, uncertainly, and crossed the room, stopping only as you reached the doorway. "I will not forget this night, Professor," you vowed.

"No," I agreed. "I rather suspect you won't."

And so at long last I had accomplished what I had set out to do: I gave you direction. From that moment to this one, your life has held meaning. Perhaps that is why the universe has conspired to end our lives in this fashion--how could either of us go on without the other?

  
* * *

  
It was a simple enough task to lure you here, to Reichenbach Falls. I simply had to, as you flew from me in danger for your life, ask myself what you, were our positions reversed and you on my heels, would do--and then do it. I am sorry to say that you were predictable to the end, Holmes.

Once here, it was simply a case of separating you from your companion, Dr. Watson, but as I knew that you would serve as my accomplice in this task, it posed no great difficulty. And then it was just the two of us--and Moran, of course, in hiding. I explained to you my methods in avoiding the London police--as if that were a task of any great difficulty--and you enlightened me on those you utilized in bringing my gang to that which is what you call justice. You wrote your note to Dr. Watson--which he will no doubt one day publish in The Strand alongside all your other exploits, when I am gone and there are none but my brothers to defend my name.

And then there was nothing more to be said, and we simply looked at each other, waiting, knowing that this was the end, and prepared to meet it.

The silence was more then I could bear. "Would that you were a woman, Holmes!" I cried out.

"We can thank the Redeemer that you were not," you rejoined. "You are danger enough as it is."

"You are condemning London to chaos, Holmes," I pointed out. "You and I are each a force for order. We control the criminal element each in our own way. Without us, they will burn down London."

"Then let it burn," you said, and the struggle began, and within an instant we were over the side of the cliff.

I am no more a man of faith than you, Holmes, but if what the parsons say is true and there is an immortality to the soul, then I have no doubt that this shall be our Sisyphean task: you and I, endlessly plummeting, trapped in a fatal embrace.

Perhaps we are in Hell already, Holmes.

**Author's Note:**

> [36+ Yuletide Comments](http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/28/requiemat_cmt.html)


End file.
